No answering cheer appeared upon my lunchless features. “A prize-fighter at ten-thirty, and a prima donna at twelve. What’s the next choice morsel? An aeronaut with another successful airship? or a cash girl who has inherited a million?”
Norberg’s plump cheeks dimpled. “Neither. This time it is a nice German old maid.”
“Eloped with the coachman, no doubt?”
“I said a nice old maid. And she hasn’t done anything yet. You are to find out how she’ll feel when she does it.”
“Charmingly lucid,” commented I, made savage by the pangs of hunger.
Norberg proceeded to outline the story with characteristic vigor, a cigarette waggling from the corner of his mouth.
“Name and address on this slip. Take a Greenfield car. Nice old maid has lived in nice old cottage all her life. Grandfather built it himself about a hundred years ago. Whole family was born in it, and married in it, and died in it, see? It’s crammed full of spinning-wheels and mahogany and stuff that’ll make your eyes stick out. See? Well, there’s no one left now but the nice old maid, all alone. She had a sister who ran away with a scamp some years ago. Nice old maid has never heard of her since, but she leaves the gate ajar or the latch-string open, or a lamp in the window, or something, so that if ever she wanders back to the old home she’ll know she’s welcome, see?”
“Sounds like a moving picture play,” I remarked.
“Wait a minute. Here’s the point. The city wants to build a branch library or something on her property, and the nice old party is so pinched for money that she’ll have to take their offer. So the time has come when she’ll have to leave that old cottage, with its romance, and its memories, and its lamp in the window, and go to live in a cheap little flat, see? Where the old four-poster will choke up the bedroom—”
“And the parlor will be done in red and green,” I put in, eagerly, “and where there will be an ingrowing sideboard in the dining-room that won’t fit in with the quaint old dinner-set at all, and a kitchenette just off that, in which the great iron pots and kettles that used to hold the family dinners will be monstrously out of place—”